The course on war and morality and the service-learning option in
it that are described in this paper are motivated by the belief that
political philosophers should help students see more clearly the
relationships between various forms of political violence. I
think of this as something like a hypothetical imperative: if
political philosophers have any special responsibility at all in a
democratic society, it is to acquaint other citizens with the wide
range of phenomena - from acts of war at one extreme to legal
lynching and administrative bullying at the other - that can be
subsumed under the generic heading of political violence.

I discuss this notion of political responsibility and the meaning
of political violence in the first two sections of the paper. My
purpose there is to introduce and explain why I have taught a course
on war and morality centered around service-learning. There is not
enough room here, nor frankly do I feel prepared to offer at this
time, a theory of political violence that would adequately justify
such a strong imperative to use service-learning in political
philosophy courses. The method of the course was experimental and the
purpose of this paper is more descriptive than justificatory.

Having said this, I should also acknowledge that very few
students, as far as I can tell, including the service-learning
students, left the course with a clearer understanding of the
relationship between war and other forms of political violence. This
proved to be too ambitious a goal. However, I believe, based on the
evaluations they turned in at the end of the course, that some of the
students did gain a better understanding of the effects of the
violence of war, and that some of them are in a better position to
make the connections between the violence of war other forms of
political violence as they encounter them later in life.

I. The Political Responsibility of Political Philosophy

In a recent article on service-learning in Teaching
Philosophy, Patrick Fitzgerald argues that it is ironic that
moral philosophers do not include themselves when reminding
professionals of their broad social responsibilities and specific
moral duties to their patients and clients. Philosophers are
professionals too, yet they rarely worry about what they owe society
in return for their privileged
position.(1)

Fitzgerald suggests that one way that moral philosophers who teach
applied ethics can meet their own social responsibility is through
service-learning options in their courses. The main benefit to
students and society from this kind of service is that students seem
to be better prepared for and more likely to perform socially
responsible activities later on. At least, that is what the students
in Fitzgerald's small sample said. After performing their public
service, they believed that they were more understanding of the sick
and unfortunate and more likely to lend a helping hand. Leaving aside
the reliability of this self-assessment, are there similar
responsibilities and potential benefits for philosophers who teach
political philosophy, not applied ethics?

The first thing to note is an important difference between courses
in political philosophy and applied ethics. Whereas applied ethics
courses aim to prepare professionals to act morally, the standard
political philosophy courses do not have the same kind of normative
developmental purpose. Applied ethics courses emphasize the positive
responsibilities of professionals, including the duty to respect the
rights of patients and clients. Although some political philosophers
have discussed the noblesse oblige of public
administrators,(2)

most political philosophy does not distinguish between
professional and civic responsibilities. In a democratic society all
citizens, including political philosophers, have a strong but
qualified allegiance to the state and a duty to respect the rights of
their fellow citizens. Academic political philosophers explain,
justify, and sometimes criticize this allegiance and these rights and
duties.

This difference in purpose is reflected in a difference in content
between applied ethics and political philosophy courses. The
sub-field of applied ethics in moral philosophy continues to grow
rapidly. From its origins in medical and legal ethics, it now has a
foothold in almost every professional discipline from engineering and
architecture to business and journalism. The format of applied ethics
courses across the board is the same. Students are confronted with
moral dilemmas and a method for resolving them. Sometimes the method
is fairly abstract, say, some variety of utilitarianism. Sometimes it
is more casuistic and tailored to the particular problems faced by
the profession in question. Either way, applied ethics courses follow
a fairly predictable trajectory from contemporary problems as
different as brain death and the risk of a suspension bridge
collapsing to moral judgments and back again.

In contrast, political philosophy courses, whether taught in a
philosophy department or under the name political theory in a
political science department, focus on the structure and limits of
government that can make it a legitimate object of political loyalty.
Some political philosophy courses are historical, concentrating on
the structure of government in texts such as Plato's Republic
or Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Other political philosophy
courses are organized around problems or topics such as justice,
political equality, and freedom of speech through the writings of
contemporary philosophers such as John Rawls, Martha Nussbaum, and
Ronald Dworkin. Instead of emphasizing the legitimacy of government,
they focus on the rights a legitimate government should protect, the
duties its citizens have when their rights are protected, and the
character needed to exercise these rights responsibly.

Neither historical nor problems courses in political philosophy
are addressed to future politicians or public policy makers. They are
addressed to citizens and designed to teach greater political
literacy, that is, how to speak the language of rights and duties,
and mean it. Even though many pre-law undergraduates take these and
other philosophy courses, they do so usually because they have heard
that they will help them score well on the LSAT, not because they
think political philosophy will make them more politically
responsible lawyers or public officials.

In political philosophy courses like these, what should students
learn that is analogous to the moral character development that
Fitzgerald claims service-learning can provide in applied ethics
courses? One answer is that they should learn about the limits of
political obligation, even in a just or well-ordered
society.(3)

This seems too narrow to me. It reduces political responsibility
to the occasional crisis in a nearly just society when politics
intrudes into everyday life and no longer can be
ignored.(4)

My view is that political philosophy should enable students to
recognize the origins, forms, and effects of violence in the
political society they inhabit and the ways that some societies can
export political violence abroad, so that they may be able to limit
and cope with political violence lest civil disobedience becomes the
only alternative to uncritical acquiescence or complicity.

II. Political Violence

Let me now introduce the subject of political violence more
directly, using the first text that we read in the course.

In 1959 J. Glenn Gray wrote The Warriors: Reflections on Men in
Battle, a memoir of his experience as an Allied interrogation
officer in World War Two. Throughout the book Gray emphasizes the
similarities between the sometimes erotic, sometimes callous feelings
of soldiers and citizens in general toward violence. It is a frank
and disturbing indictment of a culture of violence that was reissued
in 1970 during the Vietnam War when Gray was reminded of how virulent
abstract hatred of the enemy can become when it originates far from
actual combat.

The Warriors is used in undergraduate courses on war and
morality because it provides students with a rich vocabulary for
discussing the concrete details of war from a personal point of view.
Gray's taxonomy of wartime modes of love, hate, and guilt helps
students make philosophical distinctions and arguments that most war
stories unintentionally obscure.

However, students also find The Warriors very difficult the
first time through. Gray is especially fond of quoting Nietzsche to
the effect that "we should choose death twice in preference to being
feared and hated" because "[n]othing corrupts our soul more surely
and more subtly than the consciousness of others who fear and hate
us."(5)

He is even more deeply committed to Heidegger's critique of
technology: "Until we learn to experience more simply and directly
our gardens and trees, the skies above us, and all the objects amid
which we move and work, we will find it difficult to achieve
closeness to neighbors and even to
ourselves."(6)

These themes either baffle or repel students, who don't understand
what they have to do with war.

Without defending Gray's uncritical reliance on Nietzsche or
Heidegger, I do wish to endorse his general claim that we have
difficulty coming to terms with violence in modern Western societies
because those who are supposed to control violence often cover it
up.(7)

According to Gray, "sometimes it takes penetrating eyes to notice
the violent undercurrents of daily life in our Western society, so
commonplace do they seem and so adept are public officials in keeping
the more overt out of sight."(8)

In wartime, it is not hard to spot intentional harm to civilian
populations. From terror bombing to economic embargoes, these methods
for pressuring the enemy by weakening their own domestic support are
openly confessed and justified by the doctrine of realism. In
peacetime, no such harsh version of raison d'etat is
available in democratic countries, so statistics must be manipulated,
silence bought, and those who suffer from violence cleverly
disenfranchised and their complaints buried in committee. The
cumulative effect is what Gray calls an "atmosphere of violence" that
"draws a veil over our eyes, preventing us from seeing the plainest
facts of our daily existence."(9) Not
all violence is political in this sense, but in modern Western
societies Gray argues that it often is.

Now, at the turn of the century, it no longer requires
"penetrating eyes" to see political violence. The "veil" has been
lifted, and no one, certainly no public official, tries to keep
violence -- from domestic abuse to terrorist bombings to grinding
ethnic cleansing -- "out of sight." Instead, political leaders and
bureaucrats speak of the need to cope with the effects of violence
and manage the risk of violence within acceptable limits. This casual
attitude toward violence is not restricted to ordinary citizens.

Not long ago the President of the United States, in a
tone that suggested presiding over the closing ceremonies of the
twentieth century, publicly admitted that the country he was chosen
to lead is the world's most violent society. He offered this insight
as he would announce another self-evident fact, such as the country's
ever accumulating debt or its inviolable entrepreneurial
spirit.(10)

Violence has become a routine part of the cost of doing political
business, and this makes the problem of political violence even more
urgent than Gray thought it was. If we are going to make our students
more uncomfortable in the presence of political violence, then we
will have to teach them to recognize the violent undercurrents of
this kind of deficit spending. When it is treated this way and when
it is presented as merely administrative efficiency or bureaucratic
necessity by public figures, it becomes political violence. We have
to give them a feel for the violent currents that run through the
legitimate exercise of state power and the ability to handle this
burden in a cooperative way. This requires a kind of poise or
composure under fire that neither liberal nor communitarian theories
of democratic politics have
captured.(11)

To illustrate the kind of political poise I have in mind, consider
the following passage from another text we read. In his story, "The
Things They Carried," Tim O'Brien reflects on the burden he and the
other members of his Vietnam combat platoon had to carry everyday.

For the most part they carried themselves with poise,
a kind of dignity. Now and then, however, there were times of panic,
when they squealed or wanted to squeal but couldn't, when they
twitched and made moaning sounds and covered their heads and said
Dear Jesus and flopped around on the earth and fired their weapons
blindly and cringed and sobbed and begged for the noise to stop and
went wild and made stupid promises to themselves and to God and to
their mothers and fathers, hoping not to die. In different ways, it
happened to all of them. Afterward, when the firing ended, they would
blink and peek up. They would touch their bodies, feeling shame, then
quickly hiding it. They would force themselves to stand. As if in
slow motion, frame by frame, the world would take on the old logic -
absolute silence, then the wind, then sunlight, then voices. It was
the burden of being alive. Awkwardly, the men would reassemble
themselves, first in private, then in groups, becoming soldiers
again.(12)

The poise of the combat soldier that O'Brien describes is
analogous to the poise that a democratic citizen needs in the face of
political violence. It is the capacity to pull yourself together for
another acrimonious debate, after yet another defeat or betrayal. It
is being able to name the denials and obfuscations of public
officials and then still sit down with them to try to make things
better. Democratic citizens can't afford to burn their bridges behind
them, no matter how outraged or angry they may be. Most of all, it is
the poise to admit our own shortcomings, even cowardice, under fire
and seek strength in those "groups" that permit us to be honest about
these failings in order to overcome them honorably.

This suggests that citizens would be well-served by a certain
stoic attitude toward political violence. If they can reflect
critically on the passion for violence, their own as well as others,
they may be in a better position to resist the temptations of
political violence and the natural urge to burn their
bridges.(13)

In the political culture of the United States, the classic example
of this stoic character is Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose skepticism
toward government authority was matched by a deep commitment to
democratic citizenship. The Fugitive Slave Law represented in
Emerson's day a clear case of political violence, perhaps the
quintessential American case. His objection to it was unequivocal,
but he remained a committed democrat despite this perverse
legislation.

These things show that no forms, neither
constitutions, nor laws, nor covenants, nor churches, nor bibles, are
of any use in themselves. The Devil nestles comfortably into them
all. There is no help but in the head and heart and hamstrings of a
man. Covenants are of no use without honest men to keep them; laws of
none but with loyal citizens to obey
them.(14)

Emerson had little faith in laws and constitutions by themselves.
The Fugitive Slave Law was the case in point. But he was hardly an
anarchist. The loyalty of his ideal "loyal citizens" was to
democratic justice, not the gerrymandered government that so often
promulgates unjust laws in the name of the people.

III. Service Learning

On the first day of class in Spring 1998, one of the almost 200
students in the room asked, point blank, "Why should I take this
course? I'm a senior, and this course has nothing to do with my
major. I could probably take another course that would fulfill the
graduation requirement that landed me in this class, and that would
have less reading and less writing than this one." I was stunned,
although I probably should not have been. Like most colleges and
universities, Michigan State University now makes it clear to its
students that they and their families are consumers who deserve a
good product at a reasonable price. This student was only expressing
what was on the minds of most of the other students in the class:
"This better be a good deal." In other words, "if I do all the work,
I expect to get a good grade."

I responded nervously that even though she did not think the
experiences of war that citizens have endured on, behind, and between
the battle lines have much to do with her major or her life right
now, that will probably change. I said that it is likely that war
will touch her in one way or another. It may not even be the result
of a new unforeseen war. Someday she may find herself trying to
comfort a parent, grandparent, or someone else close to her who needs
help coming to terms with the memories of war and its aftermath. It
is better to think about these things before they happen.

Another student then asked, "Have you fought in any wars?" My mind
began to race. I said that I lived through several wars that the
United States had been involved in, beginning with Vietnam but
including the wars in Central America during the 1980s and the
Persian Gulf War. I alluded to my opposition to these wars, but
mentioned that many of my relatives were involved in World War Two
and that their experiences and losses also had been important in
shaping my views about war and peace.

The second student sat expressionless. Then, he asked, "Is this a
course about war or about anti-war protests?" That first-day-of-class
fear was never higher than it was at this moment. I wasn't just
afraid that I wouldn't capture their attention or they wouldn't like
me. I was afraid that they would see right through me.

Actually, these skeptical students had a point. I was not exactly
sure that this course was going to work. What kind of service could
20 students provide to wartime veterans that they could then share
with their other 180 other classmates and that would enhance
everyone's understanding of the course material?

Despite these doubts, I assembled a stock of readings. In addition
to the Gray and O'Brien books, this included Robert Kotlowitz,
Before Their Time; Louis Begley, Wartime Lies; Lan Cao,
Monkey Bridge; and selections from Studs Terkel, The Good
War; James Carroll, An American Requiem; Paul Hendrickson,
The Living and the Dead; and Binjamin Wilkomirski,
Fragments. I thought that these readings would be realistic
and unblinking without succumbing to the standard ideology of moral
realism that infects so much first-person narrative on war. I also
wanted students to see how wartime experiences vary dramatically
depending upon whether one is a soldier, a munitions worker, a nurse,
a refugee, a protester, or even a troubled dissembler. My general
plan was to use examples and questions from Michael Walzer's Just
and Unjust Wars to focus on particular moral dilemmas faced by
the authors and characters in these texts. But I knew from experience
that this wasn't going to be enough. Walzer describes the moral
dilemmas of civilians, soldiers, and officers, but his perspective is
still removed and dispassionate. He asks us to step back and consider
what our shared moral vocabulary requires of us. As powerful as this
discursive strategy can be for academics who are accustomed to this
kind of inner dialogue, it wasn't going to get my students to think
about how the violence of war might affect them as individuals on,
behind, or between the lines.

My desire to bring the students closer to the experience of
wartime veterans, before they were unreflectively overwhelmed by
political violence, led me to begin the course with two poems from
Wyslawa Szymborska. The first, "Some People," describes the "grayish
stoniness" of the refugee, and the helpless life they lead. It
registers, I think, what happens when human connections are destroyed
and the world becomes abstract. There is only "another wrong road
ahead."(15)

Then, we read "The End and the Beginning." Here Szymborska
describes the process of cleaning up when the war is over and how
memories are gradually buried. Eventually,

This poem infuriated many students. They thought Szymborska was
saying that we must forget the past. Doesn't she say, "The bridges
need to be rebuilt?" And if we get on with the rebuilding,
eventually, we will turn away from interminable disagreements about
"causes and effects," and be able to relax and enjoy the "clouds."

My own interpretation is that Szymborska does not favor this kind
of forgetfulness. However, the fact that the students read her this
way enabled me to contrast this view with Gray's injunction that
unless we remember why we are willing to fight wars that necessarily
result in the deaths of so many civilian non-combatants we will
become "refugees in an inner
sense."(17)

The choice, then, as the students saw it was between Gray's
critique of the inner refugee who has no moral compass and no
destination and Szymborska's entreaty to put the past behind us. They
couldn't accept the message to forget that they attributed to
Szymborska, but Gray's way of remembering left them cold, as I knew
it would. His effort to recover his own past, to "remember to some
purpose," bewildered them. It was this personal space created by the
tension between Gray and Szymborska that I opportunistically hoped
the other texts and the service-learning project would begin to fill.
I used Walzer to supplement these texts, but as a critical lever for
opening the texts it had proved ineffective, at least in my hands.
The disagreement between Gray and (their reading of) Szymborska
proved to be pedagogically more useful for me. It created an
atmosphere that was more conducive to integrating the
service-learning option into the course as a whole.

The service learning option offered in these two semesters was a
collaborative writing project that had several parts. Twenty
individual students were paired up with twenty community volunteers
for approximately two hours per week during ten out of the fifteen
weeks. The student's main task was to produce a written account of
the volunteer's wartime experience. The experience could have been in
combat as a soldier, nurse, or doctor; behind the lines as a parent,
loved one, or industrial worker; or between the lines as a prisoner
of war, a refugee or a war protestor. One goal of this part of the
project was to get the student and community voluntary to work on
something that would be of mutual benefit to them. The student would
benefit from learning firsthand how difficult it is to come to terms
with the experience of war. The volunteer would receive assistance
putting this experience into words, thereby gaining greater control
over it. A second goal was to get the students to stand back and
reflect on the relationship between the wartime story they helped
compose and the other material they read for the course. In addition
to the collaborative writing project, the students wrote a 3-5 page
interpretive essay relating these two things. Which books and
articles they used depended upon the content of the wartime story
they helped their community volunteer to write.

An additional task for students in the service learning project
was to meet in small groups with me to discuss how their
collaborative writing project was going. I met with the students
three times in groups of 4-9 students. Some students had problems
getting started, especially where their community volunteer was
elderly and had a difficult time focusing on a single incident or set
of experiences. Other students had no trouble at all and hit it off
with their community volunteer right away.

These small group discussions were awkward at first. The students
were nervous about the project and nervous about how I was going to
grade them on it. For some this remained true throughout the
semester. But most of them soon came to enjoy reporting to the group
on the unexpected obstacles they encountered and the curious things
they learned from their community volunteer. "I got an idea of what
ideas others had for the final project, what kinds of questions to
ask my volunteer." Another felt relief: "It made me realize that I
wasn't the only one having minor problems. Also, I felt good because
many had more difficulty."

The final task was to turn the wartime stories into a script for a
readers theater performed by three students from the Theater
Department. This was performed at the end of the semester for all of
the students in the class and the community volunteers, almost all of
whom came, some with their families. The idea here, in addition to
recognizing publicly the work of the students and the community
volunteers, was to bring the service learning project back to the
class as a whole so that other students could learn from it as well.
As one student said, "The best part was seeing the faces of the
volunteers light up - everything was worth it. This also served as a
benefit to those students who didn't partake in this option, I'm
sure."

After the second readers theater in Fall semester 1998, a
discussion broke out in class between the community volunteers and
the students. This was probably the most productive part of the
entire enterprise. Volunteers eagerly compared experiences in World
War Two with Vietnam and Korea. World War Two veterans compared their
experiences after the war, some returning to college, others forced
to re-enlist because they had not yet finished high school and
couldn't find work. Students discovered how irrational combat can be
as one volunteer, a fighter pilot in Vietnam, explained how his own
mission reports were rewritten. One community volunteer, in response
to a question by a student, noted that he had never spoken about his
wartime experience to his own children or grandchildren. Now he
would. This proved to be a more common reaction than I had
anticipated.

Along with the readers theater, I collected the wartime stories in
a small 30 page booklet that was given to students and community
volunteers, and also posted on the web page for the
course.(18)

The service learning students also filled out a short evaluation
of the service-learning option in addition to the regular course
evaluation that all of the students in the course completed. Students
thought the project was "wonderful" and "an experience to remember."
Slightly more revealing were comments about "actually seeing" how war
affects veterans, not just reading about it, and how the books we
read themselves "became more real." One student proudly showed me a
picture of her and her roommates celebrating her community
volunteer's birthday at the volunteer's home.

The community volunteers were given a short questionnaire and
expressed both appreciation for the opportunity to get to know their
student on a personal level and satisfaction with the way that they
were able to make a little more sense of their own wartime
experience. The community volunteers tended to take more time
composing their evaluations than the students did. Several spoke
about the importance of the project and the readers theater for their
families. As one said, "I learned something about articulating my
memories of war - I hadn't done much of this, especially with my own
family members." For another, "It was cathartic, but also allowed me
to write it down for my own family, and now put it behind me." One
community volunteer said "I have grandchildren and great
grandchildren who could never understand. It is difficult to convey
your true feelings about wartime experiences."

These comments surprised me. I did not expect that the project
would enable the community volunteers to rethink and publicly present
experiences that they had not shared with their own family members at
all. I thought that the volunteers would be people who already felt
very comfortable sharing their stories. For some, it seems, this
public remembering could now take the place of sharing these memories
with their families. For others, it may serve as a first chapter in a
new conversation with their children and grandchildren.

In general, the comments that the service learning students made
about the course, consistent with their 3-5 interpretive essay,
suggest that they felt that they did learn something about wartime
experience that they did not get from the other readings and the
classroom discussions in the course. It is difficult, however, to say
exactly what this is. Almost all of them felt some personal
connection to their community volunteer, and said that just meeting
someone with this kind of story to tell and helping them tell it was
important to them. Some were more articulate than others in
identifying parallels between episodes in the books they read and the
wartime stories of their volunteers. This was the subject of their
interpretive essay and the quality of these varied considerably.

On the negative side, some service learning students felt that the
amount of work they put into the project was not reflected adequately
in the formula for calculating the final course grade. Other students
who did not participate in the service learning project felt that
service-learning students were graded on a more generous scale than
they were.(19)

In fact, the grades for the service-learning students were
slightly higher than for the rest of the class in both semesters. My
teaching assistants gently reminded me of this at the end of the
first Spring semester, and I am sure that I had more to do with this
than I should have. We changed the division of labor the following
semester, and the disparity was reduced but not eliminated.

One could argue that the service learning students chose this
project because they knew that their learning styles were more suited
to this kind of work than the standard academic paper assignment.
There is probably some truth to this. My impression, when I visited
regular recitation sections, was that some of the service learning
students who had received relatively high grades on their
interpretive essays were not contributing as well to the recitation
section as most of the other students, yet on average they received a
higher grade for the course. On the other hand, some of the very best
students in the course elected the service learning option.

Conclusion

None of the students said in the service learning evaluation that
he or she saw political violence in his or her own life more clearly.
What does come through is a new confidence in their ability to make
sense of experiences radically different from their own. "It made me
see things from a different perspective. Very satisfying." From the
perspective of a Vietnam Vet who was"infuriated at the mass media?"
From the perspective of a World War Two Navy WAVE who defended her
daughter when she was "involved in sitdowns during high school to
protest Vietnam?" From the perspective of a pacifist serving as a
medic in World War Two who "realized then that he needed and wanted
to join the fighting force?" From the perspective of a Navy Task
Force Commander in Vietnam who refused to obey a superior's foolish
order "to send his men out to ambush every night?" From the
perspective of a fighter pilot disillusioned by the inaccuracy of
official body counts? From the perspective of a landing craft pilot
on D-Day who saw what students saw in "Saving Private Ryan" and much
more? From the perspective of a combat nurse in Vietnam whose
composure under fire was "no big deal?" The students working with
these community volunteers knew that the bright line between violence
and legitimate force had been blurred in these cases, even though
they didn't label it political violence.

One of our authors, Robert Kotlowitz, visited the Spring class to
read from his World War Two memoir and take questions. In response to
one student who asked, "What did you learn from your wartime
experience?" he said, " I learned that I am both much less and much
more than I thought I was before I went to war." Kotlowitz, one of
three survivors in a group of 40 soldiers killed in an obscure battle
in France, does not fit the stereotype of the battlefield hero. On
his return to camp, after he was pinned down for 12 hours in the mud
by enemy machine gun fire and had to listen to the other soldiers
slowly die around him, he tried to confront the officers responsible
for ordering this suicidal mission. He could only recoil in disgust
at their feeble attempts to deny their responsibility for this
tragedy. "They couldn't wait to get rid of me," he
said.(20)

That Kotlowitz, a private drafted into the war right out of
college, has come to terms with this single act of political violence
forty years later through the act of writing suggests it may be too
early to assess the full effect of this service learning experience.
A better measure of the success of service learning projects such as
this may be whether later in life students and teachers can recognize
political violence when we see it. If they can do it with the same
kind of poise that Kotlowitz and many of the community volunteers
showed as they worked through their own difficult memories in writing
and in conversation with these students, I think the experiment was
worthwhile.

Notes

1. 1.Fitzgerald credits Annette Baier with
first raising this question: 'More than a decade ago Annette Baier
worried aloud about the social role of the moral philosopher. Why,
Baier asks, should the rest of society "not merely tolerate but
subsidize our activity, given what we do and how many there are of us
who do it?" This is a question that ethicists rarely ask, and it is a
disgrace, Baier claimed, given that we belong "to a calling which
claims to be more reflective than others."' Patrick Fitzgerald,
"Service-Learning and the Socially Responsible Ethics Class,"
Teaching Philosophy, Vol.20, No.3, September 1997, p.256.

7. This, of course, runs counter to the
familiar Weberian distinction between violence and the force of a
legitimate political authority. For example, murder is an act of
violence but capital punishment is the act of a legitimate political
authority, kidnaping is violence but extradition and incarceration
are not, bombing civilians is an act of violence but collateral
damage to civilian population centers is not. Robert Paul Wolff
analyzes this distinction between violence and force in "On
Violence," Journal of Philosophy , Vol.LXVI, No.19, October 2,
1969, pp.601-16. Wolff rejects the distinction as polemical because
he believes that no state can be legitimate. I believe the
distinction is simplistic for historical reasons.

11. For a conventional view of liberal
political education, see Eamonn Callan, Creating Citizens:
Political Education and Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1997). For my own critical view of liberal political
education, see Intimacy and Spectacle: Liberal Theory as Political
Education (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).

13. On the classical Stoic program for
"extirpating" the passions, see Martha C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of
Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton:
Princeton University Press), Chapter 10.

19. 19. I did all the grading for the
service-learning students and only some of the grading for the other
students. Two graduate teaching assistants did the rest of the
grading for the non-service learning students. Service-learning
students attended regular discussion sections with other students in
addition to the three discussion sections I held for them, and they
also participated in the three email discussion exercises along with
the other students.

20. Robert Kotlowitz, Before Their Time
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), p.147.